Angels won't try to play keep up?

Most journalism really begins with a good tip, and it doesn't matter whether a potential scoop comes from a whistleblower, insider, stool pigeon, PR guy on the sly, tattle tale, a child in my wife's fifth-grade class, a narc in my wife's fifth-grade class or potential crackpot.

So I took careful notice of Jim Joyce's information.

“I wanted to let you know that the Dodgers are in the playoffs,” wrote Joyce. “The Angels are not.”

OK, so not every story takes an immediate Watergate turn, but when I get done with Jim Joyce I suspect he's going to wish I had referred to him as Deep Throat.

“Your article (Tuesday morning) was about the wrong team,” continued Joyce. “I read the first few paragraphs and had to stop.''

I felt the exact same way about his email.

Now I don't like writing about the Angels these days any more than most of you. But more than three million fans bought tickets to attend games in Anaheim this past season and I'm trying to understand why
Craig Sager is getting all dressed up for the Dodgers, and the Angels are nowhere.

Some folks are even talking like the Dodgers are the favorites to win the World Series. Less than two seasons ago they were owned by
Frank McCourt.

Is this what can happen when you just get rid of a really, really lousy owner?

I know this, a little more than three months ago the Angels and Dodgers were dead even as major disappointments. They both had their injuries to overcome, both talked up a turnaround as if they were really telling the truth and then went their separate ways.

When I arrived in Atlanta I checked in with
Ned Colletti, the comeback of the year winner among general managers. As competition goes, he lapped the field.

I asked Colletti about Angels counterpart
Jerry Dipoto. I explained I have yet to meet him and Dipoto is currently hiding from me or
Angry Arte. Colletti seemed to understand.

But no matter how horrible it got under McCourt and the
Screaming Meanie, who used to be McCourt's wife, Colletti never went into hiding.

“I called Jerry around midnight sometime in May,” said Colletti while the Dodgers took the field for practice. “Both teams were struggling so I thought here was someone who was going through the same thing that I was going through and he would understand.”

Dipoto understood, but curled into a ball and pulled the covers back over his head. The Dodgers, meanwhile, won 62 of their final 90 games with Colletti adding playoff pieces like
Michael Young and
Brian Wilson.

Is this simply a case of one general manager being better than the other?

Don Mattingly's boss suggested he was maybe games away from losing his job as the team's manager earlier this season. Mattingly does not have a contract for next season, and he looked like a guy who couldn't manage.

Angels manager
Mike Scioscia came under similar heat, but his boss still owed him more than $25 million and Scioscia didn't have to worry about his next meal.

So is the difference here just a matter of who might be the hungriest right now to prove himself worthy as a manager?

A little bit of this, a little bit of that and when the Dodgers meet the Braves tonight, check out the talent assembled, which includes
Matt Kemp standing on crutches. Talent doesn't come cheap.

Colletti worked for a really, really lousy owner in McCourt who was also cheap. But he now works for Dodgers owners who seem to have bigger things in mind than knocking a few bucks off the price of beer.

Colletti said money is never the first thing mentioned when talking about improving the Dodgers.

The Dodgers payroll topped $234 million, flying past whatever baseball calls its luxury tax threshold and forcing the team to pay an additional $10 million because it wanted to win so badly.

They tell me the Angels spent around $141 million and much of it was misspent and potentially damaging for years to come.

And I'm told by folks who have been let down by the Angels for some time now that they will have to trade either
Howie Kendrick or
Mark Trumbo so they can afford better pitchers. Who trades good players if they are trying to win more games than they lose?

More than anything, almost every story I read about the Angels these days includes a paragraph written as fact: The Angels won't go over the luxury threshold next season because you know
Arte Moreno …

So before I turn all my attention to the Dodgers for the playoffs and getting Jim Joyce off my back, are we to just understand the Angels have no intention of keeping pace with Los Angeles' baseball team?

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